Doorhammer: Age of the Skaven

Instead of my regularly scheduled dungeon debrief I instead ‘briefly’ redirect you to the Gamesday UK recap video from the producers and chime in. Its rather lengthy for a producer’s podcast (instead of their usual minute video this ones about 5 minutes!) so for those who are overwhelmed by its length I shall provide the highlights!

Recap of 2010 – 1.3.5 = New city, EU merge, 1.3.6 = AAO & Sov Sets, Eternal Citadel SC, and Wild Hunt (I guess 1.3.4 got the shaft in the 2010 recap =(, boo SC weapons, I mourne thee.) Actually pretty much anything that happened before June was omitted so it wasn’t really a ‘last year recap’, it was more of a ‘summer recap’

1.4 RvR Pack (oh wait til I dissect this…)

3 Packs (milking you for money)

RvR focus (until you read this and find out the new Skaven-themed zone is a 24v24 dungeon, assuming the info is valid. Now correct me if I’m wrong but I thought they said the new RvR pack would have NO PvE and dungeons scream PvE to me… Oh and not only that but I can already see the flaws emerging from this dungeon – what if you’re outnumbered? do you queue/wait for 6hrs for a queue of 24 to fill up? open all the time or farm rat pelts to flip? 5million bugs minimum? I thought it wasn’t suppose to detract from RvR. I smell another LotD and this is HUGE boo-hiss. You know like when LotD was released as a ‘PvP lake’ and you had to fight to get the enemy out and had that PvP dungeon purge mechanic which blows and you have to farm resources to flip the stupid zone just to get purged in the middle of a buggy-ass boss fight. Yeah it totally doesn’t sound anything like that.) I really can’t fathom how more people aren’t upset with Mythic for the shit they’re dishing out and calling it meatloaf.

Skaven Themed (see above RvRvE dungeon crap, oh and how you get to put on a Skaven skin for keep takes)

RR100 (i.e. we can’t think of new crap to keep you in the game so we’re banking on your addiction of purple numbers to hook you for another year until we can think of more crap to dish out…RR120 sounds good right?)

Buying fluff with real $$$ that – and I quote “Have no impact on game balance” <– waiting for that shit to hit the fan. (more money farming)

Barber Surgeon (Hello fellow dedicated War players! We released these awesome new faces/hairstyles for the launch of WAR in Korea and you can’t have them, but thanks for playing for 2 years. Oh wait… well you can have them now I guess, ‘for a price’. BTW why were there no new faces/hairstyles for the Dwarves/greenskins? The female dwarves look worse than the male dwarves…

RR Points revamp – This ones good!

New RR sets – YAY, I love sets, just not competing against RR23s for Sov -_-

RvR changes – Mind you these are meant to make it ‘harder to flip to the city’ because after the bright minds of Mythic got rid of forts, a year later they realized the city is pushed too much (4 times a day is too much?!) so now they’re introducing Doorhammer: Age of the Skaven! Thats right! Now all you have to do to flip a zone is turn into a rat and pound on two doors and sit on a flag for 30 seconds, that easy, I mean hard… its meant to slow down the city pushes. So you’re like a rat-hen. You wanted playable skaven?! Here are your playable skaven kiddies! Oh and don’t worry about the rats working for Order, its totally cool with the lore – there’s this one book where a slayer and elf were manipulated into killing a skaven clan by their rival skaven clan. That clears the lore issue! So there you have it I predict the future of Warhammer as being late night/early morning city pushes as people log on to empty zones to skavenhammer a door down and sit on a flag for 30s and BAM insta flip. You know on my server, at certain hours Order has trouble getting 6 people together for a keep defense. This smells like success already.

Playable Skaven – -cough-bullshit-cough- Enjoy your skaven-pet-skin. i.e. We heard that you wanted Skaven two years ago but we really didn’t have the time, money, resources, desire to construct a functioning race and/or pairing (which by the way Eka, must have taken you 7 years to do alone, because our team can’t simply think of anything new) so here are your ‘playable skaven’. Square peg, meet circle hole. Don’t worry next year we’ll get playable lizardmen – but you only get to turn into a lizardman while jumping over barrels in the city, which to make it easier to get to RR80 will give you 5k renown.

Do I think this patch is bullshit? Absolutely not… >.> <.< You know, I thank Thehealeroftru for trying to bring my blog to the attention of the developers, but at the same time I know they must hate me because I am no fanboi like some people and for that reason they will never listen to me. I do not like what you are doing, and trust me, I am not alone in my discontent. Perhaps unlike the developers, I play the game and listen to my fellow gamers – I hear what they want, what they like, what they dislike, and how they are upset. I apologize for my intense negativity in this post, but in all honesty Mythic try and listen to your player base and work with them. Stop being a dictatorship that hands stuff down and is sure we will love whatever you dish out. Just because you think your shit smells nice doesn’t mean we all agree. I am a little tired of having all the Q&A questions going to the softballs lobbed by the fanbois, while the hardballs from people who actually love Warhammer get dodged or flagged as ‘Trolling’. I sincerely invite someone from Mythic (and not Hank the phone operator) to an open dialogue with the player-base. Hell, talk with me. If you’re afraid to talk with evil Eka I can redirect you to more mild people.

I think it all boiled down to resources. They used what they had and unfortunately, some corners were cut. My hope is that these packs are popular and it opens to door for some real expansion. Even though I don’t care, a huge number of people wanted Skaven as a truly playable race. It’s pretty easy to see and would be a way to perhaps print money.

My other hope is that once 1.4 comes out, that they can truly focus on expansion rather than fixing. The game will be totally revamped so keep up the bug fixes, but get focused on new races, classes, zones, dungeons, etc.